Review: Ozark, Season 4 Part 1

By John Ruberry

After a nearly two-year gap, the Netflix series Ozark is back with Season Four. Actually, this is Part One of Season Four, which consists of seven episodes. Part Two of this season, also consisting of seven episodes, will be released later this year and then Ozark will conclude.

The series, if you haven’t heard of it, is centered on the Byrde family from the Chicago suburb of Naperville. Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is a financial planner whose firm launders money for a Mexican drug cartel. As I mentioned in my first Ozark review, this is not a wise idea. As he is about to be murdered after the cartel discovers money is being skimmed, Bryde convinces his assassins that the Lake of the Ozarks area of Missouri is an ideal place to launder even more money for the drug fiends. Byrde quickly departs for the Ozarks with his family, which is comprised of his wife Wendy (Laura Linney), their teen daughter Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz), and their younger son Jonah (Skylar Gaertner).

The Lake of the Ozarks area is hardly crime free paradise, and they quickly encounter two other criminal families, the Snells and the trailer dwelling Langmores.

Skipping way ahead to season four, the interactions, alliances, and betrayals among these three families continues. The FBI, here shown as an underhanded and conflicted agency, you know, kind of like the real FBI of the 21st century, is trying to break the cartel–through the Byrdes. Oh, the Kansas City mob has a presence here too. As does a big pharmaceutical firm.

By the time viewers reach the current season, the plots and subplots of Ozark are quite complicated. So if you want to enjoy Ozark–and I believe you will–you must start with the first season. However, Ozark hasn’t had a new episode in two years and memories, mine for sure, tend to fade. So I found myself, while watching the new episodes, having thoughts like this one: “Hey, whatever happened to that guy, wasn’t he murdered a couple of seasons ago? Who killed him again? And why?” Clearly, Ozark now needs Game of Thrones style recaps.

Bateman, Linney, Hublitz, and Gaertner all deliver captivating performances. However, topping them all is Julia Garner as Ruth Langmore. She’s already received two Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series Emmys and I cannot imagine her not getting another nomination at the very least. Also quite good is Lisa Emery as Darlene Snell. Her character is involved in a complex relationship with Ruth’s cousin, Wyatt Langmore (Charlie Tahan).

There’s even a rift in the drug cartel between its head, Omar Navarro (Felix Solis), and his nephew, Javier “Javi” Elzondro (Alfonso Herrera).

While it is set in the Ozarks, most of Ozark is filmed in Georgia. In the latest batch of episodes unlike Season One, the Chicago scenes were filmed in Atlanta. So I found it amusing to see a streetcar in what is supposed to Chicago’s Loop. Chicago hasn’t had streetcar service in decades. A new character, a street-smart Chicago private detective, Mel Sattem (Adam Rothenberg) travels to the Ozarks to investigate a disappearance. He also has a New York accent, not a Chicago one. I mean, hey, if Heath Ledger, an Australian, can do a Chi-CAW-go AXE-cent as the Joker—the Dark Knight was filmed in Chicago–so can others. Here’s a tip: talk through your nose. In an unintentional bit of humor, while discussing a potential move back to Chicago, Marty tells Charlotte that Chicago will be “safe.” Clearly, they haven’t been following the dramatic rise in crime in the city since their move to Missouri, including in Lincoln Park, a neighborhood they are considering.

Wendy was a Democratic Party operative in Illinois. She’s conspiring, as she did in season three, with Republicans to buy respectability for the Byrdes. During that alliance-building the Republicans look really bad. But I have to point out Illinois, which is essentially a one-party state, a Democrat one, is one of the most corrupt states in the country. And let’s not forget Wendy is the matriarch of a money-laundering family. But the Republicans are the villains here. In Season Four, “Republican” is used in the dialogue twice. “Democrat” not once.

Coincidence?

All four seasons of Ozark are streaming on Netflix. It is rated TV-MA for graphic violence, drug use, obscene language, and nudity.

John Ruberry regularly blogs from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.

Less easy but vital 2022 Republican issue: Chopping into Pentagon bureaucracy

Fighting inflation will require the US government to begin balancing its books, and it will have to cut costs to do so. One of the largest areas to cut costs is the military, and while its fashionable for conservatives to spend big on military, the truth of the matter is that the military is inherently wasteful. It spends without abandon, and the taxpayer doesn’t seem to get everything they pay for from it.

We can in fact cut 10% to even 20% of the military’s budget without much harm, however, past efforts to do this never really yielded much success, because they simply trimmed at the edges without addressing real, systemic issues that exist. Republicans would do well to address these issues.

The top issue that makes the Pentagon expensive is bureaucracy. The military employs over 750,000 civilians and over 500,000 contractors. Many of these jobs make sense for civilians to execute because they require deep knowledge in an individual field, but plenty of them are administrative bloat. The problem with trying to cut these positions is that positions typically get cut by seniority, so newer positions (created typically to address new problems) are cut first, and old positions that may be obsolete, but inhabited by someone with seniority, are cut last, if at all.

Targeted cuts to our civilian and contractor force should be accompanied by technological solutions. There are hordes of people that simply build PowerPoint slides, rehash data in different formats and in general make busy work. Existing technology today can replace them, but the military lacks the spinal cord to cut these people and embrace technology. Part of that is poor infrastructure (see the recent post about Fixing Our Computers), and part is a corps of senior military leaders that are unable to embrace new technology.

Which brings me to the third point: trimming military senior leaders. We now have almost 1,000 flag and general officers, which is not the most we’ve had, but the percentage has increased over the years, while the level of responsibility and actual decision making has decreased. Worse still, our selection process for flag officers has remained relatively static over the years, so we continue to pick officers that are often stuck in the past. Keep in mind that forward-thinking officers like Hyman Rickover relied on political connections to circumvent the selection system, and our current system very rarely produces warfighters like James Mattis anymore. Not only do these ranks need to be trimmed, but its time that we begin placing forward-thinking civilians on the selection boards to ensure we’re picking officers that can fight in the increasingly complicated environment we find ourselves in.

The last point that any Republican administration needs to address is Acquisition Reform. We continue to pay astronomical costs for basic equipment. We’re not talking about hypersonic research, but basic things like computer networks, paper, and basic services. Congress has been terrible at addressing this because it benefits their individual districts, but there is no reason companies cannot make money while delivering valuable goods at a market price to the military.

Without addressing these core issues, trimming the Pentagon’s budget will result in more non-change, and worse, will affect the youngest and smallest programs that might be more focused on winning tomorrow’s wars then existing programs.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

2020 election was “the most secure in American history” according to Democrats, but now Biden is already questioning 2022 midterms

By John Ruberry

Shortly after Joe Biden declared victory in the 2020 presidential election–one that Donald J. Trump said repeatedly was “rigged,” staff from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declared that election “the most secure in American history.”

Left-wingers, particularly those in media, viewed that statement as sacrosanct, a papal bull for liberals. But a radio host, I believe it was Mike Gallagher, issued a sagacious response to that sentiment, which went something like this, “If 2020 was the most secure election in American history, which one was the second-most secure?”

Silence.

In short, that statement on the “secure” 2020 presidential elections was a hollow as the one from 60 former national security officials about the Hunter Biden laptop, where they made the since-debunked claim that emails from Hunter’s laptop showed signs of being part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

So if the 2020 presidential election, in the mind of leftists, was really “the most secure in American history,” how did we go from that to Biden, in last week’s rambling press conference, questioning the results of elections where the ballots haven’t even been printed yet, the 2020 midterms.

“Well, it all depends on whether or not we’re able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election,” when asked by a reporter about whether those races would be “fairly conducted” and “legitimate.”

Wow. The Democrats and their media allies continue to pillorize Donald Trump for casting doubt on the results of the ’20 election, but here is Biden calling into question the upcoming midterms.

It’s difficult to say if Biden was having one of his great-grandpa moments or was succumbing to the Democrats’ wont to cast every political issue as an existential crisis. Perhaps both. Jen Psaki once again had to conduct a clean-up in the supermarket aisle as Star Trek’s John Gill created another mess.

The Democrats have been in a hyper-tizzy for almost a year because of the recently-enacted Georgia voting law, which expands early voting but also establishes controls to minimize vote fraud. Biden called it “Jim Crow on steroids,” a hateful insult, because until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, black voters were disenfranchised in most of the southern states, including Georgia.

The 2021 Georgia reforms are in fact about election integrity.

Despite multiple calls from conservative pundits, Democrats haven’t come up with a single person who was unlawfully denied the right to vote in 2020.

Adding oxygen to the Dems fire, earlier this month Biden likened opponents to what he calls “voting rights” to notorious racists Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Jefferson Davis. All three were Democrats, by the way. Here is some more history for you. Nineteen senators voted against the 1965 Voting Rights Act, seventeen of them were Democrats. Some of those Dems were still members of the Senate when Biden was elected to that body in 1972.

While of course it is many within the Republican Party, led by Donald J. Trump, who question the result of the 2020 presidential election, it was the Democrats, of course without scolding from their media allies, who did the same after Trump’s victory in 2016 and George W. Bush’s narrow win in 2000. Just two weeks ago it was revealed that Vice President Kamala Harris’ new communications director, Jamal Simmons, repeatedly questioned Bush’s 2000 victory.

At the very least, the overuse of ballot drop boxes in states that Biden narrowly won, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia, just might have nudged Biden over Trump in those states. The drop boxes were brought into the voting process because of COVID-19.

Who filled out those drop box ballots? Who deposited them into those boxes?

But don’t worry. The experts said it. The 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Easy issue for 2022 Republicans: reform adoption laws

Fortunately, people are beginning to write about how they don’t simply want Republicans to win elections, they want them to, you know, actually make some conservative wins in our government. Some are also saying “Hey, you haven’t won yet,” which is very true, since actually counting the votes seems to matter more than voting itself. To truly win though, as I pointed out earlier, its not sufficient to go back to the way things were, because that’s a regressive message that is, frankly, loser speak. Republican legislators need to advance issues that matter to us beyond tax reform.

So, let’s start picking some, and let’s start with adoption.

Anyone that has tried to adopt a child knows that the process is absolutely miserable. The state will come and inspect your home, check your background and during the whole process treat you like a common criminal. They’ll point out that you don’t have enough bathrooms, or enough safety devices, or enough whatever, which pushes would-be parents to spend thousands on their homes. Then, when that’s done, it can take months to find an eligible kid, even though there are literally thousands of kids in foster care that deserve a good home.

When a friend of ours (white) adopted a young boy from Africa (black), she caught a bit of flack for not adopting someone of “her kind.” She told me it was far easier to adopt a kid from overseas than from the US, and after we talked about the struggles she went through with the local state adoption agency, it all made sense. Another friend of mine tried to adopt his wife’s daughter (she was divorced and remarried), but because he was military and moving, the local state government held that against him and kept the daughter with her dad in a substandard home.

These sad cases point to a problem: a deep-state bureaucracy of adoption workers that have an interest in making sure the system is difficult and expensive. When over a half a million children are in need of a family, this is entirely unnecessary, yet I haven’t heard one politician actually try to fix the issue.

A winning strategy would look like what President Trump did to the VA. He cleaned house and began firing underperforming staff, then set about reforming the way VA claims were handled. He created a White House hotline for VA claims that has proven successful at clamping down on the filthy bureaucrats that drag out the process and cost veterans thousands of dollars in lost payments. While the VA isn’t perfect, its far better than it was a few years ago.

We need the same for adoption. Republicans should put a cap on the cost of adoption. Would-be parents shouldn’t spend thousands to give a kid a loving home and a far better chance at life. How is it we’re paying foster parents while charging would-be parents and then more often than not denying them a child? Isn’t that theft? Isn’t that redistribution of wealth in another form? One might even argue its a form of modern day slavery.

How about “6 months to a good home” as a motto? Republicans won big when they pushed legislation that made concealed carry permits a shall-issue permit, instead of letting local sheriffs deny otherwise lawful Americans the right to protect themselves. If a would-be set of parents has a good home, it should take no more than 6 months to place a kid identified as a good match. Period. Six months from “We would love to give Johnny a home” to “Johnny is now in our home.”

Not only would this begin to save our children that need a good home, it would also provide a counter to abortion. Making it easier to adopt begins chipping away at the argument that you’re destroying someone’s life with an unwanted pregnancy. It’s a compassionate way to help women that somehow became pregnant and cannot, for whatever reason, support their child. Rather than lecture women on whether they should accept the consequences of their actions (always a losing formula), adoption gives a far better option of preserving life while avoiding the lecture.

This also pushes back on assaults on the family. While so-called elitist liberals talk about forcing people to give up their kids, its not enough to just say “That’s a bad idea.” One has to come to the table with something better and, here’s the kicker, actually do something about it.

So get onboard Republicans. Give the wonderful people that are trying to adopt children and make this world a bit better for a deserving kid a voice in your election run and some help against the towering bureaucracy that has been denying homes to children for a very long time.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

A dystopian and real 48 hours to commit crimes in Chicago

By John Ruberry

“You got him for 48 hours,” a prison official says to Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) in the movie 48 Hours.

And “him” was Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy), a prison inmate who is given an unauthorized furlough to assist Cates in solving some murders.

In Chicago and suburban Cook County we have a different kind of 48 Hours.

“When someone goes missing with home-monitoring–when they leave the house unauthorized,” state Sen. John Curran (R-Downers Grove) said on this weekend’s Flannery Fired Up on Fox Chicago, “they have to be gone for 48 hours before they can be charged now.”

“We’ve had stories, several stories,” Curran told the host Mike Flannery, “about people on home-monitoring committing additional acts of violent crime when they go missing.”

“And any violation [of electronic-monitoring] should bring an immediate charge–not a 48-hour window,” Curran added.

What type of people are on home-monitoring in Cook County?

“Seventy-five to 80 percent of my people on home monitoring are charged with a violent offense,” Cook County sheriff Tom Dart revealed in an online discussion last week. “I have about 100 people on home-monitoring who are charged with murder.”

The essential CWB Chicago site earlier this month reported on a Halloween carjacking where the accused was on electronic-monitoring for two armed robberies and a gun charge couldn’t be charged for violating his home confinement because he didn’t break the 48-hour threshold.

Last week some of Dart’s officers shot a Chicago man who fired at them first. The suspect is accused of a slew of sexual assault charges after he violated that 48-hour electronic-monitoring window.

There have been many other crimes committed by accused criminals under electronic-monitoring that don’t involve that two-day threshold. Some of them just simply remove the EM ankle bracelet.

Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, claims that 15 people were accused of murder while on Cook County home-monitoring in 2021. While the real number may be around 10, even that is a frightening number. Lightfoot is calling for changes in Cook County’s EM system, but her political position is weak because of her unpopularity; she is not politically close to Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney of Cook County who is one of those woke George Soros-funded prosecutors who apparently sees law enforcement as some elaborate psychological experiment rigged to enable criminals to be undercharged or to walk free. Equally culpable for this parlor-game-from-hell insanity is Cook County’s chief judge, Timothy C. Evans.

Chicago endured over 800 murders in 2021, the highest total since the crack epidemic gang wars of the mid-1990s. There were over 1,800 carjackings in Chicago last year, three times the total of 2019. And lately the Chicago area has been plagued by flash mobs of shoplifters.

Leftist apologists of course will blame the COVID-19 pandemic for the crime epidemic. Puh-leaze. While there are still mask mandates in the Chicago area, the lockdowns have been over for more than a year.

And a 48 hours free-pass in-all-but-name is only a tip of the crime iceberg in Chicago and is suburbs. As is overuse of electronic-monitoring.

And in Illinois, which saw over 100,000 people leave in 2021, there are always darker days on the horizon. Next year the state’s no-cash bail law goes into effect.

John Ruberry regularly blogs from suburban Cook County at Marathon Pundit.

Easy Republican issue to win: stop police lying

As I said previously, Republicans have been a party of losers because they take the position of not doing anything, while more radical Democrats push for ever more changes that make us look more like California and the old Soviet Union. Republicans need to actually rally under something more than just lowering taxes. I’ve got a few ideas, so let’s start with an easy one: stop cops from lying.

Now, that sounds odd right. Would police officers really lie? Isn’t that illegal? Well, fun fact, police officers can lie to your face to try and get you to confess to a crime. We’re not talking about misrepresenting truth, or talking around the issues, or any other nuanced conversation. Nope, cops can straight up lie to you. They can literally tell you they have evidence that makes you guilty when they have nothing.

Worse still, this is protected by the Supreme Court! So its totally OK for this to happen. Are we surprised when this gets abused? Let’s take the folks currently jailed for the January 6th protests. Can you bet the police and prosecutors are lying to them right now, threatening to jail them forever under the same laws used to prosecute actual terrorists? I can guarantee we’re going to start hearing these horror stories from people this year, if not sooner.

Or how about something closer to home? Virginia Beach police got caught using knowingly false, completely made up DNA tests to pressure people to confess to crimes. Yup, that just came out, conveniently right before a new Republican Attorney General takes over this weekend. Even worse, in one case this fake evidence WAS PRESENTED IN COURT! It had fake signatures and everything. How on earth can we trust a court process when DNA evidence, which is supposed to be a gold standard in a court room, can be faked?

Want to bet Mr. Miyares is going to find even more examples of this once he starts digging? I’d stake more than a few dollars on him finding out that there are plenty of abuses happening in Virginia right now.

Here’s the worst part: police get away with it. Nobody is being sent to jail over this.

Now, think about this: if you’re a young man, particularly a young black man, and you read stories like this about police falsifying evidence, and you already have some distrust of them, and you see these officers and prosecutors walk away unscathed, why on earth would you put any trust in them?

I’ve experienced this first hand myself. NCIS pulled me into a room a few years ago and interrogated me over some travel expenses I took while traveling for the Navy. The investigator, a super pushy a**-hat of a man, rattled off dates of trips I took over two years ago and said “So why did you take this trip?” I fired back that I had no idea (my memory isn’t that good), but that every trip had a description section, which I always filled out to explain why I was traveling. He told me, to my face, that all the sections in DTS (which is the Defense Travel System, an online database where government members book travel arrangements) were empty, and that he had checked that himself. I finally told them to pack sand (in a nice way) and that I would send them a written statement of the reasoning behind my trips.

Not surprisingly, when I got back to my office and logged into DTS, what did I find? ALL THE TRIPS HAD REASONS LISTED! Every, single, one. I even had additional documentation anytime a trip went over a weekend to explain the cost savings to the government. Agent A**hat had lied to my face in an attempt to get a confession. When I sent him a wonderful 3 page memo outlining all the reasons and raising the question about whether he would like to press actual charges and suggesting we should sit down with a lawyer, suddenly the investigation disappeared.

Now, I’m an angry, bitter Sailor and I tend to punch back at people. Most people aren’t like me. How much would you bet that Agent A**hat had successfully intimidated people into confessing before? How much you want to bet that he’ll do it again? If you’re in the Navy, or have a son or daughter in the Navy, doesn’t it bother you that people like Agent A**hat can operate with impunity?

Police intimidation and lying is real. It happens at all levels of government, and its getting worse. It is absolutely intimidating to sit on the wrong side of a police officer or prosecutor, worse still when they are a jerk-off loser, and be told you’ll be rotting in jail unless you confess. Republicans should make this tactic illegal, and should make it easy to prosecute anyone that uses it, especially at the federal level. Want to stop stupid cases like Kyle Rittenhouse? Start with laws that punish police officers and prosecutors from abusing their power. Republicans need to champion this cause, which affects everyone, but especially young black people, and make it a legislative priority. This is an easy win.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. For the NCIS agents reading this, I have nothing but disgust for the dirty tactics you use, and you should be ashamed of yourselves and all the innocent people you’ve intimidated and punished.

If you enjoyed this article, why not check out my book? It’s an even better read, and you can even listen to it on Audible.

Review: The Silent Sea on Netflix

By John Ruberry

On Christmas Eve, Netflix began streaming an eight-episode South Korean science fiction series, The Silent Sea, which is based on a short film from 2014, The Sea of Tranquility. Both projects were directed by Choi Hang-yong.

The show brings us to a dystopian world nearly all of Earth’s water is gone. What water remains is of course rationed.

Such environmental havoc hasn’t prevented the Republic of Korea’s Space and Aeronautics Administration from building an expansive base, Balhae, on the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.

Han Yoon-jae (Gong Yoo) is recruited to lead a mission to retrieve a valuable scientific sample from the Balhae base. Five years earlier 117 people were killed by a radiation leak and the base was abandoned. Han has an ill daughter whose proper treatment depends on receiving a higher water ration classification. Also recruited for the mission, for reasons no one can ascertain, is Dr. Song Ji-an (Bae Doona), a former astrobiologist, now an ethologist.

Here’s the plan: In a space shuttle-type craft, the SAA launches the 11-person crew, most of them armed with handguns, so they can land at the Balhae base, locate the sample, and quickly return home. Things don’t go well–the poorly briefed crew doesn’t know what to expect. Some crew members know more than others, the chief engineer, Ryu Tae-seok (Lee Joon), is among them.

Laying out plot twists will produce numerous spoilers, so I’ll leave them out of my review. Being the first Korean science fiction series set in outer space, The Silent Sea is understandably derivative. It owes much to John Carpenter’s brilliant 1984 sci-fi thriller, The Thing.

Although subtle, there is a Christian influence in The Silent Sea as well. Quite unlike the blatant image of a golden calf hurtling through space in another recent Netflix release, Don’t Look Up, which I only saw short segments of while I walked through our living room when Mrs. Marathon Pundit was watching.

Viewers of The Silent Sea will enjoy a suspenseful ride with compelling acting. On the flipside, the series is a bit long. It appears to be a six-episode series that has been stretched out to eight. And the ending was a bit of a letdown for me.

Amazingly, the desertification of Earth here is not blamed on human-caused climate change.

The Silent Sea is currently streaming on Netflix, it is available in Korean with subtitles with bits of English dialogue, and in dubbed English with subtitles. It is rated TV-MA for violence and foul language.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Republicans will win in 2022, but still be a party of losers

I’m not a fan of Democrats. Once the façade dropped and Democrat-led cities began letting criminals run the streets without facing any sort of charges, it was obvious that Democrats had become the party of lawlessness. Once the abortion debate took a nasty shift into infanticide, where people literally said that a baby could be born and then the doctor would have a conversation with mom on whether to ~~keep it alive~~ murder it, Democrats became the party of killing innocent kids.

But I’ll be damned if I’m excited about Republicans. I watched Republicans at the federal level own the House, Senate and Presidency, but then fail to fix health care and Social Security (you know, those programs that are going to eat us alive in the long run!), fail to fix our defense spending and actually get the quality and quantity we need for the price we’re paying, and fail to, well, really stand for anything. At the state level, things were better in some areas, but even plenty of Republican Governors and state legislatures have been complacent, allowing all sorts of silliness to run amuck in their states.

So yeah, Republicans will still be the party of losers, even if they win in 2022. After much angry thinking, I think it boils down to a few key problems:

Republicans don’t ever make progress on anything because they are the party of NO.
Republicans can’t fundraise from normal people.

Let’s start with the party of NO. Republicans seem to always fight to return to the status quo, like somehow things were so much better in the 80s under Regan, or Bush, or the 1950s, or insert your own time period here. They remind me of some of the old people at my church that only seem fit to complain about how things were so much better under a different Pope and in a different time. As you read this, can’t you hear these people talking? Doesn’t it sound like nagging to you, like something your aunt or uncle that you hate spending time with would do?

Let’s contrast that to Democrats. Everything is about “progress.” Now, I laugh at the term “progressive,” and to me its a negative thing, but Democrats are always progressing towards something, typically Communism in some other form. But I give them credit, because they are on offense. All the time. They are focused on scoring points in the game we call politics. That means they push for things like $15 dollar minimum wage, or free health care, or abortion access to everyone, or letting men compete in women’s sports. These are all terrible ideas, but that misses the point, because they are on offense, over time offense conquers defense.

You can’t simply be the party of NO and expect people, especially young people, to be excited about voting for you. I’ll write more later about progress that Republicans should be making, but I’ll pick one here: adoption. If you’ve ever tried to adopt a US baby, it is an expensive and frustrating process, where the state is happy to charge someone thousands of dollars, let some low life state employee rummage through your home and find “issues,” and in the end only have at best a 50/50 chance of adopting a kid. If I was running for office, I’d make “Free adoption” one of my rallying points, both as a counter to the abortion culture and as a way to start dismantling some of the ridiculous bureaucracy that plagues our country and squanders our tax dollars. That puts me on offense, and if it gets repeated enough, it’ll be part of a larger winning package.

Now what about fundraising? Well, go back to 2016, where Donald Trump totally did not raise as much as Hillary Clinton. I saw this at the local level here in Virginia as well, where Democrat candidates at all levels outraised Republicans nearly two to one. Money matters. It buys you ads, gets your name out there, sponsors events, lets you send flyers and lets your candidate travel. Rallies, events, dinners, interviews with local news and shaking hands all matter. They build excitement and help the buzz about a candidate, especially by word of mouth, spread quickly.

Republicans fail here for two reasons. First, they make it hard to donate. Every Democrat candidate has a Paypal, Venmo and Cashapp donation button. Republicans? Here in Virginia they want everyone to go through some stupid WinRed website. Churches got it right when they made it easy to throw a twenty dollar bill in the collection envelope, or donate automatically online with about 3 clicks of the mouse. How are Republicans so far behind on this?

The second reason is failing to excite young voters and get small donations. One might blame this on demographics, but unexciting candidates are a bigger reason. Bernie Sanders might be crazy, but he’s damn persuasive in person. So is Donald Trump, and so was (and is) Bill Clinton. That’s why they can get young people excited to throw 20 dollars at them. That money adds up. Most Republicans seek to kiss the ring of some person working the local GOP party infrastructure, which gets some big business donations, but not the tidal wave of money we see Bernie able to bring in.

As a conservative, I’m frustrated with the party that I tend to vote for. I want to be excited to vote for Republicans at all levels, but until they start becoming a party of YES, and make it easy to fundraise, they are always going to be losers no matter what election cycle we are in.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you like this post, please consider supporting the author by purchasing his book on Amazon!

Seeing red over green

By Christopher Harper

Going green may end up making many of us see red, particularly since the Brandon administration plans to force automakers to make 50% of all automobiles electric by 2030.

All you have to do is look at the issue with one crucial mineral in developing a “green” car: lithium.

First, the cars will be significantly more expensive. The cost of lithium has increased as governments push for so-called “green” technology. Lithium, a mineral that is key for electric car batteries, has skyrocketed more than 250% over the last 12 months, hitting its highest level ever, according to an industry index from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

The average cost of an electric-vehicle battery ran $157 per kilowatt-hour, a measure of energy capacity, in 2021, the Department of Energy said. That means a typical EV battery costs between $6,000 and $7,000, a Bloomberg analysis showed.

Battery costs would need to come down to $100 per kilowatt-hour for overall EV prices to compete with traditional internal combustion engine cars, according to Bloomberg. The price of lithium will play a prominent role in achieving that goal.

Second, the United States has limited lithium resources, while China and Russia have vast amounts of the mineral. Depending on China and Russia for such minerals is a bad option in anyone’s book. Just think about how the U.S. dependence on foreign oil dominated American economic and foreign policy for decades.

Third, a big surprise: environmentalists, who say they want “green” energy, don’t want the mining industry to provide it from the United States.

Lithium Americas proposed to mine lithium on a dormant volcano in Nevada. However, the firm has yet to mine any lithium due to pushback from environmentalists and ongoing lawsuits related to allegations that the federal government approved the company’s mining permit too quickly.

But there’s more. Lithium isn’t technically what’s known as a “rare-earth mineral” because there’s supposedly enough to go around. We’ll see how that works out once the developed countries force most people to buy an electric vehicle.

China mines over 70% of the world’s rare earths and is responsible for 90% of the complex process of turning them into magnets used in electric vehicles and other “green” technologies, such as windmills.

Not surprisingly, environmentalists are also holding up permissions to mine rare earths in the United States.

Isn’t it time to realize that the movement toward “green” energy needs to pause to determine what economic and political costs are associated with such a radical change in the energy needs of the United States?

Do we really want to be dependent on China for our energy?

If environmentalists want green energy, don’t they have to allow more mining in the United States?

The answers seem pretty apparent to me.

People Joe Biden needs to fire in 2022

By John Ruberry

Joe Biden endured the worst year of any president since Jimmy Carter in 1980. Stagflation, the Iranian hostage crisis, and his well-deserved thumping at the hands of Ronald Reagan made it an annus horribilis for Jimmah–and America.

Sadly, we are facing three more years of Biden. But in case I missed it, I don’t believe Biden fired a single person in 2021, despite a series of debacles. His predecessor, Donald Trump, wasn’t afraid to hand out pink slips.

Here’s a list of people that Biden needs to fire.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The goal of the CDC is, well, you know. And despite Biden’s campaign promise to “shut down the virus.” He hasn’t and nor has Walensky. Despite vaccines, more people have died of COVID-19 in 2021 than 2020. And last year the Delta and Omicron variants emerged.

Walesnky is a dope–or perhaps a budding tyrant. In November she praised China’s “really strict lockdown” that allegedly resulted in a low death rate. What rational person can trust the ChiComms on COVID?

Last month the CDC admitted that it greatly overestimated the number of Omicron cases in the United States.

Merrick Garland, Attorney General. Political junkies remember Garland being touted as a moderate, not a hard liberal, when Barack Obama nominated for the US Supreme Court seat that became vacant after the death of conservative jurist Antonin Scalia. But “Moderate Merrick” is a real as Bigfoot. In October Garland directed the FBI to target Americans who protest the school boards and administrators that allow bigoted critical race theory to be taught in schools. This move is an intimidation tactic against protesters and besides, any such threats, if there are any, should fall under the purview of local law enforcement.

Garland would better serve America if he concentrated on real threats to public safety such as Antifa.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A proponent of a woke military, Milley, a Trump-appointee, presided over America’s humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan. An honorable person would have resigned after the Afghanistan catastrophe.

Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense. See above.

Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State. There are still hundreds of Americans trapped in Afghanistan.

Ron Klain, White House chief of staff. Many believe, including longtime political reporter Brit Hume, that Biden is senile–including me–and a figurehead. Then who is really president? Some say it’s Klain. If so, then he’s responsible for Biden’s turn to the hard-left. Yes, Biden is another phony moderate. Anyway, it’s not working.

The White House anti-fossil fuel policy has driven up the price of gasoline and the pumping of cash has given America its worst inflation in nearly four decades.

Susan Rice, director of the United States Domestic Policy Council. Ric Grenell, former acting head of National Intelligence under Trump, says Rice is really president. Perhaps she is co-president with Klain? Biden needs to fire both of them and replace them with real moderates. America is still a center-right country.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Trump should have fired Fauci in 2020. St. Tony of Wuhan is an embodiment of the DC Swamp, he’s been in office for nearly four decades. His greatest talent is keeping his job and getting himself on television.

Over 800,000 Americans have died of COVID. Fauci has given conflicting advice on things such as wearing masks to prevent COVID–not needed, then needed, and still needed, for starters. And Fauci lied when he said that National Institute of Health didn’t fund gain-of-function research on bats and coronavirus at Wuhan. Such research may be responsible for the COVID outbreak.

Yes, I will almost certainly vote for a Republican for president in 2024. But I love this country too much so see America fail badly for three more years.

And in regard to the headline, when I say, “People Joe Biden needs to fire in 2022,” I mean sooner as opposed to later.

How ’bout the first working day of the new year?